Wednesday 5th August 2020

I’ve genuinely lost track of time.

I have been convinced today is Tuesday.

This has not helped with The Climb, where I’m seriously behind on posting.  Apologies.  The truth is that times get busy, either with writing projects or real life, and sometimes I just don’t have the energy to write up The Climb at the end of the day.

I want each day to be interesting, but some days – especially those where I’m waiting on things – could be summarized as  The Climb #5684 – Still Waiting.

If you asked me what I get out of writing The Climb, it’s several things.

First, it’s documenting the creation of various projects.  The way I’ve done it is even if I can’t say what the project is, I’ve used codenames and labels, so when things could theoretically be talked about, I can just rename the labels.  I also try and give hints as to where I am, so you will be able to find out that when I wrote X, I was having a good day or a bad day.  It can be difficult sometimes and I liken it to discussing a show with a friend whilst there are people in the room who’ve not seen the show and want to avoid spoilers.

The second is speed.  I don’t have a lot of time to write The Climb.  I have a real job, I have the actual projects themselves.  When I wrote Action-Figure, there was definitely a push for quantity.  That meant sometimes writing when I was falling asleep at the keyboard.  The purpose of that site was to get information out.  So there were loads of typos.

But that relentless push for more articles meant that I learnt how to write fast.  I learnt how to write when the inspiration wasn’t there.  It wasn’t always good, but I got the information out.

I want to recapture a little of that with The Climb.  I certainly don’t want to be making typos, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time editing it.  The aim is to get it out and get it out quickly.  It’s the writing equivalent of going to the gym for me.  I want the first draft to be the last draft.

Likewise, because I don’t have a lot of time to edit beyond a one-pass readthrough… I want to be able to edit fast.  In the past when I was churning out articles for Action-Figure, I would miss a lot of stuff.  As I moved into print magazines I got a lot better… but the longer a piece is the exponential growth there is in errors.

The Climb allows me to practise with longer pieces.  Hopefully you don’t notice too many typos that slip through,  but if you do I hope they are becoming less over time.

On days when I don’t have time to write,  I’ll often have notes to myself.  I don’t plan,  The Climb is pure pantsing.  I start writing, go off on some tangent and then try and bring it back to the start.  Sometimes I succeed.  Sometimes – especially those days when nothing really is going on – it can be a wandering mess.

But as I say, the idea of The Climb is to see it as a collective piece.  Behind the scenes I’m trying to ensure every episode comes out on time and says something meaningful.  It doesn’t always happen but if so, then there’s always tomorrow….

..which might be Thursday or is it Wednesday?

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